It takes a long time to learn gratitude. When I look back and recall some of my schoolteachers, I’m sorry I never took the time to thank them — to let them know their hard work made a positive impact that still reverberates in my life. I wish, sometime before she died, I had located… Read More

In 1964 our family drove cross-country to see the World’s Fair in New York. On our last day in town, my mom and I took the subway to 51st and Broadway to see Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand. I was 13, starstruck, and thrilled to be in New York. But when we entered the Winter… Read More

In the years when I was growing up, which were the early years of television, my family watched a lot of TV together. My dad had his recliner, just like Archie Bunker, which no one else was allowed to sit in. My mom sat on one end of the sofa to his right, crocheting. The… Read More

My mom was a wonderful mother in many ways – patient, modest, innately kind — but she was not a particularly good cook. “Oh, I was a boring cook,” she admitted once when she was in her 70s and taking her meals in the dining room at Leisure World, the retirement facility where she and… Read More

It seemed reasonable to me. I was about to go to Europe for three months, and if I budgeted myself correctly the trip would cost $450 for the entire summer. So that’s what I did. It was 1971 and I was 20, the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I’d saved money… Read More

Vegas was totally different in the early ’60s. With 100,000 residents it had one twentieth the population of today, and while it had a certain tacky sheen it hadn’t approached the aggressively grotesque grandiosity you see today. It was quieter, more modest, less inclined to force itself down your throat. Read More

Monday, June 9, 2008. Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. I awake early and hear my hostess Shirley Randell swimming in her pool. The goat outside my window bleats. A bit later Shirley, dressed in the sari that’s her daily costume, is rushing off to work. I arrived yesterday, bleary and beat. Shirley was on the… Read More

I never asked to be a movie critic. And yet it happened. People don’t believe me when I say this; they assume movie reviewing is such a plum job that I must have scrambled and hustled to get there. Not really. In 1991 I’d been working at the San Francisco Chronicle seven years when the… Read More

I’d heard how tough and intimidating Lucille Ball could be, but on the day I interviewed her at her home in Beverly Hills she was warm, unguarded and down-to-earth. It felt like hanging out with a favorite aunt. Lucy picked up quickly on the fact that I was a fan, and since I was young… Read More

Compared to most mid-century couples, my parents married late. Dad was 34, Mom 29, and they figured they had no time to waste in starting a family. My brother Danny, born August 25, 1949, came first, and for a brief time he reigned unchallenged, the celebrated prince. For Dad, it was a long-deferred dream to… Read More